Panelists: Mike, Tad, Regan, Alessandro, Lennart. Read about day one.

Having survived day one of GDC Canada, filled with meeting great people and listening to excellent talks, the next day would even top my experience. First, of course, I went to see the keynote by Bioware founders Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk about their quest to fully engage a player emotionally in the interactive narratives they create. Again, it was a very friendly atmosphere, almost like you were hanging out at a friend’s place for watching game trailers and having barbecue. The presenters were excellent, however, contentwise I yearned for more than just a recap of Bartle’s player types and cool clips of their milestone games, but was left unserved. Then, there was also this trailer, which was different and disturbing:

Anyway, the keynote was brief enough to head back up to Future Play again and join the excellent workshop on Designing Effective Exercise Video Games organized by Nick Graham, together with Tad Stach and Regan Mandryk. I really enjoyed the presentation and also the topic does warrant a lot of research and got me really intrigued to look into this in more detail. Maybe even follow up on it with an article. After a brief lunch, it was then time for our ultimate panel on game metrics and biometrics (empirical game research fueled by numbers), which was accumulating the speakers you see in the picture at the start of this article. Mike, Regan, Tad and Alessandro are all experts in their areas and we had a lot of fun putting this together and discussing it with the audience (albeit maybe too brief for such a broad topic). I must say that this really was my highlight of the conferences. The slides to this are here:

Following this, I tried to get my adrenaline down again for one last talk that I had to give on my research paper at Future Play 2009 called From Playability to a Hierarchical Game Usability Model. This theory allows some of my other research to be placed in context. It was the shortest of the presentations I was giving, but nevertheless, you can find the slides here:

The other papers in this session about generative behavior patterns and measuring gaming preferences were also really interesting. So, I decided to stick with Future Play for the rest of the day, watching Alessandro‘s presentation on gameplay metrics, and an innovative approach to 3D tracking using two Wiimotes presented by David Scherfgen, who I met right after I got off the plane and hung out with during some spare time at the conference. He also is the author of the German game programming book “3D-Spieleprogrammierung mit DirectX 9 und C++” (3D game programming with DirectX 9 and C++), so you should really buy that book to support his studies!
The session closed with a health game talk by Tommy Brett of Algoma U, for which I miserably failed at playing his flash game (for demonstration). The day ended with too much rain, but lots of good feelings.

So, I close with acknowledging that Canada is an excellent environment for developing games and Vancouver is a great place to have a conference. I hope to be able to come back in the future.

Photo by Lennart (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License)

Just came back from joint conferences GDC Canada and Future Play, a combination of events that I would like to call the perfect game-industry-academia cocktail mixed by some very talented Canadians. I had the pleasure to speak at both events about the subject I am passionate about: Psychophysiological Player Testing and Metrical Game Research.

But back to topic: The first annual Game Developers Conference Canada was held from May 12-13 at the Vancouver Convention Center and apparently evolved into this event from the Vancouver International Game Summit (according to NextGen Player). The motto of the conference was “learn, network, inspire” and for me it lived up to this promise. It started very casual with a keynote interview with Don Mattrick, who is a legend among Canadian developers and has been in this industry from its early beginnings (evidenced by some excellent past/geekhood pictures in a video introducing his career).

Next session I ended up in was the “Army of Two” postmortem by Reid Schneider of EA Montreal, who talked about production stuff, but more importantly about the metrics logging system that Electronic Arts uses, which is integrated in a debugging technology called JUICE. Looked somewhat similar to Microsoft’s TRUE system, but less sophisticated. He showed some heatmaps (death maps) of their test levels and talked about the data that are used to check levels, apparently consisting of events like player death, player wounded, player unconscious, partner AI death, partner AI wounded, partner AI unconscious, NPC death, player death, game over, etc. – Reminded me of the stuff I did for one of my papers (Log who’s playing). Anyway, was very excited to see game metrics logging in action at EA.

Next, I should have gone to Clive Chandler’s Emotion talk, but instead went one floor up to check on fellow academics presenting at the parallel Future Play event. Had a sneak peak into Doris Rusch‘s workshop on Making Deep Games, where she talked among other things about love in games. Somewhat artsy for me, but very interesting nonetheless. Had to leave early to set up stuff for my own talk at GDC Canada titled Next Generation Testing: Biometric Analysis of Player Experience. I had a very nice audience with good questions at the end. See the slides below:

Next up was an interesting talk about what game developers can learn from the German car masters at BMW. Just had to see that one. Started fairly slow, but was full of metaphors and comparisons and ultimately a very valuable talk from Otto Ottosson of Threewave. It even featured game metrics and heatmaps from their testing system (frequent and early testing is apparently something you can learn from BMW). Seems like every company is doing some sort of level metrics for game testing now! Awesome! Great way to end the first day of GDC Canada sessions.

Jam – Not Crushed Fruit
If you are studying game development or just are a hobby programmer, chances are that you have heard about the Nordic Game Jam, which is a gathering of people interested in game development that camp together and create a game around the clock for a few days (usually a weekend) in Europe. The concept is simple and the idea of fast prototyping on a small scale is something appreciated by game developers around the world (see for example the experimental gameplay project). So, it was only a matter of time until a global game jam would be initiated. It took place in locations around the world and finished today. Games created in these game jams are often the starting point to full indie games. After all, fast, iterative prototyping gave us pearls like Braid (my current favorite!), Passage, Crayon Physics Deluxe, Gish, The Marriage, and World of Goo. The developer of the latter, Kyle Gabler, gave a keynote at the Global Game Jam in which he gave seven killer tips for making a game in 48 hours. You can watch the keynote and read the tips below.

The Keynote Video

7 Killer Tips for Making a Game in 48 Hours

1. Never Fall in Love. The second theorem of destruction says “as love and effort increase, the probability of self-destruction approaches 1″. Maintain a healthy distance to your game and do not be afraid to fail spectacularly.
2. Harmony. Visuals, music, movement. Think economically: Less time means less assets means focus on harmony of what you have.
3. Shh… Audio is half the game experience.
4. Make The Toy First. Try out your game mechanic first. Once you are convinced that this is fun to play, you can flesh out the game.
5. Feel Something. Art games create feelings in the player, they have subtext and theme. If you lack the craftsmanship, at least give your game an artistic name.
6. Create a Low Barrier of Entry. A game must be fun within the first 15 seconds. If you are one of the cool kids, you include title and instruction screens in the game (as for example Braid).
7. Adjust Expectations. Introduce only ONE new concept to the world of gaming as fast and as clear as you possibly can.

The summer is hot – not only in terms of weather or the wonderful German soccer team, but also considering the amount of lectures I will be giving during my stay here in Germany, mostly at the IJK in Hannover. My stay was kicked off two weeks ago, when I met competent German addiction researcher Ralf Thalemann, who is also helping out for a FUGA study helmed by Christoph (Klimmt) and the Hannover team. Christoph himself has been active in promoting FUGA to the German press. Also, after my Quo Vadis presentation and the German press echo, I would like to think the public is slowly aware that game research is actively pushing forward as an academic discipline.

The reception at Berlin’s Games Academy was also really good and I gave a few lectures. Besides having a nice test audience for my seminar workshop on game design and experience research there, it was a good opportunity to take a sneak peak at the student game projects, most of which were impressive. Next stop was the NGRN seminar with fellow PhD students from around Scandinavia, which was almost live-blogged by Mia, so go to her blog to check out the details.

This week I am back in Hannover, where I got the news that I will also be presenting at the International conference on fun and games 2008 in Eindhoven later this year. I am taking this week to dig even deeper into statistics and talk to the experts here at HTMH IJK to get some tips. Next week, I will be hitting the CVSE research group at the University of Magdeburg, where I give a talk on Evaluating Game Usability – How game research will change the face of software applications. Later that week, I will be going to TU Ilmenau and talk about “Game Experience Research – How to gather valuable information from players”, where it will be exciting to meet new faces and students interested in game research.

So, neurotechnology for games is definitely on the rise. Usability and interaction research in games and player experience as well, judging from the positive reception of the talk I gave on the Quo Vadis 2008 Entwicklerkonferenz in Berlin last week. Now, I finally found the time to upload the slides. Hope they are helpful to you. If you have any questions concerning biofeedback gaming, game usability research or interaction techniques, please do not hesitate to write an email!

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After having the great chance to speak in Helsinki at our recent FUGA project meeting about Game Design and Player Emotions, where I talked about using psychophysiological measurements to validate game design elements for specific player emotions, I had the pleasure of being invited to Germany’s Quo Vadis Entwicklerkonferenz (game developers conference).

While last year, I could only interest a small number of people for the topic of our European Community FP6 NEST project: The Fun of Gaming: Measuring the Human Experience of Media Enjoyment. This year was different. I was surprised and very happy to see my talk jam-packed full with more than 80 interested people from the German games industry, research, and education.

Thanks to former Gamestar scribe Peter from the games section at Golem and a remark I made about Lara Croft’s butt, the talk has created a decent media echo in Germany.

However, unfortunately the press text people all somehow totally forgot to mention that my work is done within an EU project, which I clearly stated during my talk and especially at the end. Now, I would really like to emphasize this fact, since none of our groundbreaking work could be possible without the support of all our European partners! Also, the sites got the link to our research group wrong and directly link to bth.se, from which the Game and Media Arts Laboratory is quite hard to find.

Well, except for the minor glitches in detail and accuracy (for example we use EMG for measuring emotions, not GSR) in the text, I am pretty thankful for all the great feedback on talking at Quo Vadis and I am really excited about the fact that the game industry is looking towards academic research with interest and respect in Germany.

Guess that means we are on the right track. Stay tuned as I will be putting up the slides of my talk very soon. And to those of you that came to Quo Vadis. Thanks for your interest and contact! For all others out there that are interested in biofeedback gaming, and using eye tracker and psychophysiological methods to test gameplay features, feel free to drop me a line.

After receiving a travel budget from my University for the first time, I came to sit down and have a look at potentially interesting conferences for the young game academics among us. Now, with so many different focus areas within games your planning might differ. Nevertheless, I though it would be nice to share some of the initial hot spots next year for game academics. On a more personal note: In a perfect world, I could go to all these events. However, my budget would be completely exhausted by GDC alone and I can hardly dream of getting papers accepted in the variety of conferences that are coming up.

Through the progress of the next year (2008) all data is due to change

Academic Venues

• CHI Florence, April 2008
• Nordic Game, May 2008 Malmö
• NordiCHI October 2008
• Futureplay (Fall 2008)
• The [Player] conference (August 26th – 29th 2008)
• International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology Japan, December 2008

Industry-focused Events (which are interesting for academics as well)

• GDC San Francisco Feb 18-22 2008
• GC Developers Conference August 2008 Germany
• Ars Electronica (September 2008)
• FMX International Conference on Animation, Effects, Realtime and Content

You can see that most of those conferences are European focused, which is natural since I study in Scandinavia. Drop me a note if you are going to one of these conferences and blog about it, maybe we meet or I could read your reports.

Sunday, March 4

After a horribly long flight through Sweden, Denmark and Germany, we finally reached San Francisco Sunday night after spending more than a day in total for all traveling. While all the flights went very smooth in terms of connections, it still was a canned feeling especially on the flight to the US, were you really wish you could afford something more than Economy if you have to be on a plane for more than 11 hours.

It felt really good to get off the plane and take the cab to the hotel, which also seems pretty nice (thanks to Kari’s choice). All Scandinavian people are staying in the same hotel so that also gives it a home atmosphere. We fetched some food that night and I already felt very good finally living in a big city again (even if it is just for a week). Noticed a lot of homeless people on the street. Craig being a perfect role model, of course, gave them some change. Turns our most of them are really friendly to talk to.

Monday, March 5

Deprived of sleep and super excited I got ready for my first day of GDC, having considerably higher expectations of this event than any other academic that I know. First thing in the hotel lobby Craig introduced me to Olivier Lejade, who was very nice Frenchman that had formed a company called Mekensleep and just showed me a game on the Nintendo DS, where you control a little guy to push a bubble through a labyrinth. Impressing game design. Glad he invited us to take a taxi with him to Moscone Center. Really hope he found a publisher. I felt refreshed meeting a driven and bright person like him to start GDC.

What did I expect from GDC?

After getting our registration bags and badge holders, we went up to level 3 in Moscone West, where Breakfast was served. American Bagels and Muffins were the delights together with some tea and coffee. Funny thing about coffee was that I already spotted the Americans at the Entrance (they came in clusters) by carrying their Starbucks cups like Lady Liberty her torch. While I am big fan of that shop, too, I totally forgot how much it is part of the American lifestyle. But back to Breakfast, where I had an awesome choice of assorted tea and (my first time encounter with) Strawberry flavored Philadelphia. Yummy thing on bagels that is.

IGDA Curriculum Workshop Sessions

First, Doug Church of EA gave a nice little prep talk on how industry and academia should collaborate better. Did not get me too excited about everything, but gave good insight into American game industry thinking. I still get a bit tired, when those talks turn into preaching rather than communication. But my overall impression of his talk was quite good.

Next thing up was a little design workshop session with Nick Fortugno of gameLab. Somehow, I got the feeling that the gameLab people – albeit being very bright – get a little too excited in front of a crowd. The game we played with paper clips and cards was fun to redesign though.

Then I decided to have lunch not as a working thing, but more like a networking thing, where I talked to Shauna, who is currently establishing contacts with academics for her small company that works with GPS systems. Also had some discussions with other teachers in game development. I understood that quite a larger number of American game schools are direct-to-job training facilities and really not much of them are focused towards research in games. And, really, most of the researchers I met came from Europe (or at least had a European background). At least, they all cook with water. No major surprises there.

Next thing up was the workshop like session on teaching methods. Nice to see Tracy Fullerton in person, after reading her Game Design Workshop book. Still you get the feeling that those few American researchers are kind of an in-group, where they silently agree on certain approaches to things. This led me to my first conclusion of GDC: Like on an academic conference it is nice to go there and actually meet those people that you otherwise only read papers from. It is also a good reality check on how their ideas are currently going and what their real focuses are.

In the workshop I joined a team on building interdisciplinary student teams, where we collected some case studies from all the participating researchers. I am not really a big fan of “you have to do it like this and then it will work” punch-in-your-face rules. Good thing we could settle on a few points that were rather good suggestions than straight rules. What annoyed me a little bit about many of the participants of the workshop was that some of them were really turning this thing into a popularity contest. (Nothing more annoying than a 10 minute commercial about oneself and not sticking to the assigned topic.) However, we did not get to present our stuff because some people just took way too much time to (not) make their point (but rather advertise themselves).

The SIG overview that ended the thing got a nice introduction from Susan Gold, who also seems like a very nice and calm woman, who can organize things well. Unfortunately, the whole thing slowly turned into some sort of tech guide for wiki editing, where I really felt misplaced and had to leave to chat with Craig. We shared the opinion that if people would like to contribute to the SIG, they would probably do it, no matter what and the wiki is not the technical barrier that keeps them away, but maybe rather the complicated recognition and reward system of the SIG. (I kept wondering a bit on how that “board” that sat in front of us came to be. I mean they sure worked a lot together voluntarily, but how come most of those are Americans? And are all of them paid by CMP like Beth?) Sure, lots of questions there.

The stressful day ended with a nice reception at the top level and we chatted a bit with other researchers, which turned out to be a really fun talk.